In the office, time is our most valuable asset. Some people choose to spend their time near the water cooler or talking to the receptionist. The others—the select few—see their time for what it’s worth.
And every single day, they try to squeeze every ounce of time they have to hone in on their craft and get stuff done!
If you’re one of those people—the people that thrive on efficiency—then this is the blog post for you.
Here are a few tricks that can take your productivity to the next level.
1) Time blocking
If you’re new to the productivity game, then time blocking may be old news. If that’s the case, then skip ahead. If you have no idea what it is, then keep on reading.
Time blocking is when you devote a particular part of your day to one task (or category of tasks). For example, if you’re a salesman, then you spend the first hour of every day on the phone. During that hour, you do nothing but make phone calls. Let me repeat that one more time for effect. You do absolutely nothing except for making calls. Don’t check your phone. Don’t go to the bathroom. Don’t go on Facebook. Don’t answer any emails.
You should treat that hour as sacred time.
Here some things you can time block:
- Writing a blog post
- Reading emails (or answering emails)
- Self-learning
- Prospecting
- Organizing accounting documents
2) Batching
There are a few things that you may do every single day (or throughout the day) that may be more beneficial if you did them all at once.
For example, maybe every once in a while, you get a receipt that you file in your accounting system. You may get them a couple of times a day, so you perform the same task multiple times a day. However, do they NEED to be done as they appear, or could they wait until the end of the month where you devote 3 hours of filing? Doing them in batches is more efficient because you start getting into a nice rhythm and perform each entry much faster.
A task that may have taken you 5 minutes to complete may only take you 2 minutes to complete if you batch them all at once.
It may not seem like a lot of time, but when you take into account the volume of tasks you’ll be completing and thinking about how that time compounds over the long-term, batching could save you hundreds of hours per year.
3) Software
If you’re like me, then you might spend a couple of hours each month scouring the web trying to find a software that will make your life a little easier by making specific tasks streamlined.
One of my favorite tools to utilize is Gantt charts. There are many uses for them, but they are most practical with large projects where you can see the tasks, assignees, due dates, and much more of a project at a glance
Gantt charts help streamline productivity because they help avoid digging through emails or continually having to update an excel spreadsheet. They centralize all the information for a project into one spot (including the communication of your team).
If you have a team, then using chat software (versus email) will be an absolute game-changer. Email is slow and inefficient. If you use chat software like Slack or even something simple like Google Hangouts, you’ll find that your productivity will soar because there won’t be so much back in forth.